In recent years, an ever-increasing number of applications and services have been made available over networks such as cellular networks and the Internet. Due to this, an increasing number of content and service providers are turning to technologies such as remote resource sharing and cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer of a service provider will typically rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
In some cases, the customer may wish to delegate or share permissions or other access rights to with services and resources that reside within the service provider or in external networks. It is thus desirable to enable the customer to achieve such sharing of privileges in a trusted and secure manner.